Teaching Authority: The Sacred Heart Sisters’ Mississippi River Valley Mission, 1818–30

The Religious of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a society of French Catholic nuns founded in 1800, embarked on their first foreign mission in 1818, an educational mission to the American west. In a context where gender, nationality, ecclesiastical structures, and local realities all militated against them, the cloistered French sisters succeeded in establishing a network of schools in Louisiana and Missouri, and in so doing, crafted a potent, if gendered, authority for themselves as religious educators. Their efforts bore impressive results: their community grew from five nuns in 1818 to more than 220 nuns, 14 schools, and over 1300 students in 1850. In the first decade of their mission in the United States, the women religious faced a host of internal and external threats: extreme poverty; local priests inadvertently starving them of the spiritual succor that fueled their zeal; ecclesiastical leaders meddling in their educational projects; timidity in their own ranks, which inhibited their superior Philippine Duschene's ability to reconcile conflicts and hold her subordinates accountable to a shared vision. Most troubling was the flood of Anglo-American Protestants, some bringing enslaved African Americans, who overwhelmed the Mississippi River valley, shifted the demographic balance, and eroded the deep patterns of French Catholic cultural dominance upon which the nuns' educational mission was premised. How could the Sacred Heart sisters overcome religious antipathy, cultural prejudice, linguistic differences, and gender liabilities to advance their own mission and authority as educators for this new population? Within a decade of their arrival in the United States, the nuns had worked out a solution. By promoting conventional social hierarchies and traditional norms their own practices belied, the independent, francophone, Catholic women solidified their own authority as teachers, entrusted to educate even Anglophone Protestant girls.